Monday, 5 April 2010

To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing. Since we have always shared all things with them and have always had a part of their strength and, certainly, all of their knowledge, we shared likewise this experience of annihilation. It was their annihilation, not ours, and yet it left us feeling that in a measure we, too, had been annihilated. It left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted, in which the amical rooms and halls had taken on a look of hardness and emptiness. What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. They were not forgotten because they had been a part of the glory of the earth. At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.

Wallace Stevens: from Two or Three Ideas, a lecture on Baudelaire's La Vie Anterieure, given at Mt. Holyoke College, April 28, 1951 (in Collected Poetry and Prose, 1997)Farming near Klingerstown, Pennsylvania: photo by Scott Bauer, 2005 (U.S. Dept. of Agriculture)

18 comments:

Beautiful -- I've never seen this, thank you. Reminds me a bit of this passage from Heidegger's Parmenides we came upon last week --

The point is rather that the “away” of the withdrawn comes into presence itself in the essence of the withdrawal. The “away” of what is withdrawn and concealed is surely not “nothing,” for the letting disappear that withdraws everything occurs in this place -- in this place alone -- and presents itself there. The place is void -- there is nothing at all that is ordinary in it. But the void is precisely what remains and what comes into presence there. The barrenness of the void is the nothing of the withdrawal. The void of the place is the look that looks into and “fills” it. The place of lethe is that “where” in which the uncanny dwells in a peculiar exclusivity. The field of lethe is in a preeminent sense, “demonic.”

Thought I left a comment here yesterday (something about this Stevens which I'd never seen before, and about how TW's photos of the ocean "across the pond" look something like what I'd seen paddling out the day before (into the channel), plus poem (4.5) 'recording' ('transcribing') some of that -- wonder what happened (gremlins in the machine?)

4.5

first grey light in sky above still darkridge, white edge of moon through leavesin foreground, sound of waves in channel

continuum as field of space analogous to, concept

determined or together with, ideas, physical point

clouds on horizon to the left of point,whiteness of wave in windblown channel

[Steve -- now this IS weird...funny things happening with the comments here e'er since recent gremlin hijinks -- ? -- there have been mysterious "disappearances" -- anyway here is your "disappeared" comment:]

STEPHEN RATCLIFFE has left a new comment on your post "Wallace Stevens: Disappearance":

Tom,

Beautiful -- I've never seen this, thank you. Reminds me a bit of this passage from Heidegger's Parmenides we came upon last week --

The point is rather that the “away” of the withdrawn comes into presence itself in the essence of the withdrawal. The “away” of what is withdrawn and concealed is surely not “nothing,” for the letting disappear that withdraws everything occurs in this place -- in this place alone -- and presents itself there. The place is void -- there is nothing at all that is ordinary in it. But the void is precisely what remains and what comes into presence there. The barrenness of the void is the nothing of the withdrawal. The void of the place is the look that looks into and “fills” it. The place of lethe is that “where” in which the uncanny dwells in a peculiar exclusivity. The field of lethe is in a preeminent sense, “demonic.”

So far the suspects in this mysterious case of comment disappearances includes:

Goofy

Pluto

The ghost of Wallace Stevens

The gremlins

Stephen (whose comments keep disappearing)

me (but I'm still scratching my head as to the motive, though I suppose a "sleepwalking" theory might be relevant)

Alice Notley (she was the trivia question answer, after all; but then again, why would she wish to steal her own glory?)

Charon (bored with steering that punt full of groaning and complaining souls through the underworld -- we recall Jonson's "Famous Voyage" through the London sewers, e'en fouler than the heavy going in Kanal)

Mnemosyne (exacting her indirect revenge upon the narrowminded publishers who rejected Nabokov's attempt to write her into the title of his memory book?)

And now we come to the prime suspect: you, Anon, the god who has neither been dispelled nor disappeared. A helpful god, who will ease us through this blocked drain passage. A divinity transform'd into the Charon of our Aporia, though your pole be coated in dubious matter, propelling us ever onward into Forgetfulness of what we have said.

I deduce thusly: who else but the Disappearer would possess this knowledge:

"The first, though, puts me in mind of thermodynamic entropy: when a system is unwound, we have no way of rediscoving "information" about its previous state. It is "lost" to us.

"But in information theory, entropy is used to "hide" or encrypt information, so it may be accessed at a future time. The information is disordered and looks lost.

"But it is not. It is waiting for its key."

I can feel the key coming toward us, Anon, almost make out its silvery glints through the obfuscating gloom of the underworld, as it turns in your hands.

Oh my, maybe it was one of those fabled hackers, somewhere in some far off land, maliciously intent upon infiltrating what's going on here ? ? ? (I just received another comment after the poem I posted yesterday in Chinese, w/ something of it translated into English, and when I clicked to see what else it said, a picture of two people staring at each other across a table came up, at which point I erased it (having been told that such things might be from "robots" in the system bent on evil doings . . . (?)

Just when I thought the missing comment mystery was a thing of the past, that last comment mysteriously disappeared. And then fifteen minutes later came back. Probably just as a tease. I'm getting amusement park flashbacks from the 1940s.

Anon's entropy theory continues to hang in the air over the rich godless human wealth of the Elysian fields of W. Stevens.